3×3 House | Crux Arquitectos – MCP Arquitectura

The home and to live; two mysteries of the same equation raised before every project of future house, to which the architecture must give response. Every new house is an anthropologic exercise of rethinking the primitive psychology of the being, at the time that there are looked new ways of occupying and coexisting with the space. Origin and future are founded on a scenery where the human being moves recognizing corners and being done by this chunk of place during the period of time that the argument of our lives allows. Time and space like diffuse limits that annotate uses and feelings, and that also make them possible. How one can home give only response to all this. Which is the maximum essence, the common denominator.

Adolf Loos was rejecting the ornament as a need of the formalism of the architecture, moving away of perpetual personalisms beyond the mere architectural composition, a racionalist esencialismo for the new one to live functionally; a democratization of the architecture, of a way or other one, a sheet of paper in white. According to the modern look of Le Corbusier, the architecture had to leave aside the handcrafted production of the housing to initiate an industrialization, making alike this one to a useful and essential object, a machine made by union of elements, beautiful in yes same.

Almost one century after the machine à habiter, we are still asking us what is to live, and how they must be the gears of this machine: how it is this appropriation of the space, and whom we must consider to be his protagonist; when it is begun and one stops living the architecture, and if this one will survive all these updates and repairs, or if the obsolescence will reach her first. Resembling Loos I wonder, and if the nudity was not alone formally but also functionally? Let’s imagine a home that was pure architectural composition, pure concatenation of cockpits and spatial relations, visual connections, and the beauty that arises from the constructive coherence … but without established use. An esencialismo afuncional. A universal machine.

And if we could live the architecture as looking for spaces and uses in coats of the mountain (the most primitive fact of the search of cover since the human being exists), but from contemporary premises? This idea already was raising Sou Fujimoto in Primitive Future, and, together with modern reminiscences led to the end, it is felt in the work of Alejandro García and Raquel Sola (Crux Arquitectos), together with Manuel Cerdá (MCP architecture): the 3×3 House.

The 3×3 house, placed in the population of Requena (Valencia), is formed as an encabalgamiendo of opaque boxes and edges that close empty volumes. This spatial duality consists giving response to different criteria, since they are the needs of cover, or of connection, communication and relation.

But the housing also answers to a temporary duality. According to the look of the authors, if Robert Stewart was establishing five different caps from time (Front Structures>> Facilities> Partitions> Furniture), they apply two: the everlasting one and the expired one. The first cap annotates the space across stays and limits, consisting as determining established throughout the time, as orientation, gradation of privacy, soleamiento, dress, etc. This temporary cap will shape a shell where it will operate the second one, the expired thing. This one enables the spaces, subdivides them and equips them to be able to live. The opaque boxes are like that initially unfuntionals, answering to needs atemporals, to leave later the user “to enable to live” the spaces with less lasting, more light interventions, providing them with function and with facilities. In this case, the function continues to the form, but of way only temporary.

“The owner was choosing what spaces it would shape as kitchen, baths, to be, rooms and the spatial relation between them. As if we were conquering today, we, a preexisting, timeless building […]”,

the architects count, continuing with the reference to Fujimoto’s writing,

“On having entered a cave, the people re-discover how to live these geographical accidents […] a cave is not functional, but heuristic. Instead of a coercive funcionalismo, it consists of a stimulant place that allows a great variety of activities. Every day his inhabitants will discover new uses for the same place. […] I think that the architecture of the future should consist of spaces similar to caves. It would be more wealth-producing.”

The 3×3 house conforms as well as a great machine – cave, of an infinite wealth of interior possibilities. His internal tours scheme. As this great appliance of the film “Cube” by Vicenzo Natali, equally the housing works 3 dimensions across the boxes connected along that the users pass in a spatial sequence.

As for the constructive thing, it is raised using technology Ytong of block of cellular concrete, which offers a great energy efficiency on having worked for thermal inertia, it indexes other one to the massive concept of “cave”. The empty volumes marked by metallic edges work for contrast with this tectonic configuration.

The balance between dualities is constant. This simple construction of the neutrality is positioned paradoxically by personality and entity, by light firmness in the landscape and by surprise in the interior. Every element of the house 3×3 places in a limbo to except that it allows to deceive the obsolescence, and to live freely this customizable gear.